From risk management to uncertainty management: a significant change in project management

Starting with the meanings of the terms “risk” and “uncertainty,””he paper compares uncertainty management with risk management in project management. We bring some doubt to the use of “risk” and “uncertainty” interchangeably in project management and deem their scope, methods, responses, monitoring and controlling should be different too. Illustrations are given covering terminology, description, and treatment from different perspectives of uncertainty management and risk management. Furthermore, the paper retains that project risk management (PRM) processes might be modified to facilitate an uncertainty management perspective, and we support that project uncertainty management (PUM) can enlarge its contribution to improving project management performance, which will result in a significant change in emphasis compared with most risk management.

Risk Analysis of the Development of Sustainable Dongtan

Dongtan is set to be developed as a sustainable urban-rural integration,aiming to attract a wide range of commercial and leisure investments.The Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation(SIIC),the largest international investment group owned by the Shanghai municipal government,is leading the Dongtan project in partnership with Arup.The project’s risks are categorized into eight major groups:(1)Force majeure,(2)people-related risks,(3)financial and economic risks,(4)political and country risks,(5)environmental risks,(6)completion-related risks,(7)design-related risks,and(8)technology risks.Among these,political risk is particularly notable for its high probability and significant impact.Effective project risk management is essential to foresee and address uncertainties that could jeopardize the project’s objectives and timelines.Appropriate strategies must be implemented to manage and mitigate these risks.

Managing project risks and uncertainties

This article considers threats to a project slipping on budget,schedule and fit-for-purpose.Threat is used here as the collective for risks（quantifiable bad things that can happen）and uncertainties（poorly or not quantifiable bad possible events）.Based on experience with projects in developing countries this review considers that（a）project slippage is due to uncertainties rather than risks,（b）while eventuation of some bad things is beyond control,managed execution and oversight are stil the primary means to keeping within budget,on time and fit-for-purpose,（c）improving project delivery is less about bigger and more complex and more about coordinated focus,effectiveness and developing thought-out heuristics,and（d）projects take longer and cost more partly because threat identification is inaccurate,the scope of identified threats is too narrow,and the threat assessment product is not integrated into overall project decision-making and execution.Almost by definition,what is poorly known is likely to cause problems.Yet it is not just the unquantifiability and intangibility of uncertainties causing project slippage,but that they are insufficiently taken into account in project planning and execution that cause budget and time overruns.Improving project performance requires purpose-driven and managed deployment of scarce seasoned professionals.This can be aided with independent oversight by deeply experienced panelists who contribute technical insights and can potentially show that diligence is seen to be done.

Predictive Analytics for Project Risk Management Using Machine Learning

Risk management is relevant for every project that which seeks to avoid and suppress unanticipated costs, basically calling for pre-emptive action. The current work proposes a new approach for handling risks based on predictive analytics and machine learning (ML) that can work in real-time to help avoid risks and increase project adaptability. The main research aim of the study is to ascertain risk presence in projects by using historical data from previous projects, focusing on important aspects such as time, task time, resources and project results. t-SNE technique applies feature engineering in the reduction of the dimensionality while preserving important structural properties. This process is analysed using measures including recall, F1-score, accuracy and precision measurements. The results demonstrate that the Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM) achieves an impressive 85% accuracy, 82% precision, 85% recall, and 80% F1-score, surpassing previous models. Additionally, predictive analytics achieves a resource utilisation efficiency of 85%, compared to 70% for traditional allocation methods, and a project cost reduction of 10%, double the 5% achieved by traditional approaches. Furthermore, the study indicates that while GBM excels in overall accuracy, Logistic Regression (LR) offers more favourable precision-recall trade-offs, highlighting the importance of model selection in project risk management.

Measuring project performance by applying social network analyses

It is often argued that the core of organizational success is efficient collaboration.Some authors even posit that efficient collaboration is more important to organizational innovation and performance than individual skills or expertise.However,the lack of efficient models to manage collaboration properly is a major constraint for organizations to profit from internal and external collaborative initiatives.Currently,much of the collaboration in organizations occurs through virtual network channels,such as e-mail,Yammer,Jabber,Microsoft Teams,Skype,and Zoom.These are even more important in situations where different time zones and even threats of a pandemic constrain face-to-face human interactions.This work introduces a multidisciplinary heuristic model developed based on project risk management and social network analysis centrality metrics graph-theory to quantitatively measure dynamic organizational collaboration in the project environment.A case study illustrates the proposed model’s implementation and application in a real virtual project organizational context.The major benefit of applying this proposed model is that it enables organizations to quantitatively measure different collaborative,organizational,and dynamic behavioral patterns,which can later correlate with organizational outcomes.The model analyzes three collaborative project dimensions:network collaboration cohesion evolution,network collaboration degree evolution,and network team set variability evolution.This provides organizations an innovative approach to understand and manage possible collaborative project risks that may emerge as projects are delivered.Organizations can use the proposed model to identify projects’critical success factors by comparing successful and unsuccessful delivered projects’dynamic behaviors if a substantial number of both project types are analyzed.The proposed model also enables organizations to make decisions with more information regarding the support for changes in observed collaborative patterns as demonstrated by statistical models in general,and linear regressions in particular.Further,the proposed model provides organizations with a completely bias-free data-collection process that eliminates organizational downtime.Finally,applying the proposed model in organizations will reduce or eliminate the risks associated with virtual collaborative dynamics,leading to the optimized use of resources;this will transform organizations to become more lean-oriented and significantly contribute to economic,social,and environmental global sustainability.

Modelling the iron ore price index:A new perspective from a hybrid data reconstructed EEMD-GORU model

As iron ore is the fundamental steel production resource,predicting its price is strategically important for risk management at related enterprises and projects.Based on a signal decomposition technology and an artificial neural network,this paper proposes a hybrid EEMD-GORU model and a novel data reconstruction method to explore the price risk and fluctuation correlations between China's iron ore futures and spot markets,and to forecast the price index series of China's and international iron ore spot markets from the futures market.The analysis found that the iron ore futures market in China better reflected the price fluctuations and risk factors in the imported and international iron ore spot markets.However,the forward price in China's iron ore futures market was unable to adequately reflect the changes in the domestic iron ore market,and was therefore unable to fully disseminate domestic iron ore market information.The proposed model was found to provide better market risk perceptions and predictions through its combinations of the different volatility information in futures and spot markets.The results are valuable ref-erences for the early-warning and management of the related enterprise project risks.